Jan 19 20x Amazon HQ2

Amazon snagged close to 240 proposals from cities across North America to host HQ2, the company’s planned second headquarters. The online behemoth picked up all those offers in late-October and has been poring over them ever since.

Now there’s a shortlist, with 20 metropolitan areas set to move to the next phase of the beauty contest. Boston and Toronto have been frontrunners for some time, and both have made it through. Big hitters such as New York City, LA, Dallas, Austin and Miami are also on the list

Amazon says it will now work with each of the locations for a deeper dive into their proposals, before evaluating a future partnership “that can accommodate the company’s hiring plans as well as benefit its employees and the local community”.

There’s no explicit mention of the kinds of sweeteners the company is expecting.

HQ2 is set to be a standalone headquarters for Amazon, not a mere satellite office to Seattle. The company plans to pump in more $5 billion and accommodate up to 50,000 jobs, and reckons HQ2 will create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community.